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David Tyler: This year's AIIM Forum has been extraordinarily well attended, and I suspect a large part of the reason for that is the seminar and presentation programme. What are some of the main themes you touched on in your own keynote speech?
John Mancini: Basically what I was talking about in this morning's keynote was this: that the world is on the point of a big inflection. This isn't just our observation, similar things are being said by IDC, Gartner, Forrester and others. We characterise it in terms of 'information opportunity' and 'information chaos'. Gartner are saying something like 'Every business is now a digital business and every leader is an IT leader'. The central idea is that businesses are going to change more fundamentally over the next 3 to 5 years as a result of technology than in the preceding 10 to 15. So what are you going to do about that, how do you prepare for it?

That's the opportunity side of the coin. The chaos side comes out when I talk to customers of companies: 'Our fileshares are one gigantic mess', 'Information is flying out of the organisation on mobile devices like never before'. The IT people are saying that the business is trying to 'end-run' them every time they turn around. All this adds up to chaos - and people have to get serious about how they manage information assets if they're going to be able to turn that into an opportunity.

DT: Is there one particular driver toward this situation or is it more of a 'perfect storm' of changes coming together?
JM: One of the other topics I was talking about was exactly how we came to that situation, and in my view it comes down to three 'points of disruption.' One is consumerisation, and the impact that has on how we deploy solutions to people in our organisations - and the timeframes within which they expect that to occur. I always joke that the world changed in January 2011, when all those senior executives that got iPads for Christmas came into their offices and said 'Make this work'. All of a sudden people realised that they could no longer just continue business as usual.

Second is the collision between Cloud and Mobile, and how that changes the nature of work: where it's done, where information is stored, and where it's accessed. And the third point of disruption is the changing nature of work itself which is both driven by, and an influencer of, the technology. That is all to do with the desire to be flatter, more agile, more responsive, and so on. So with these three influences creating all this change, organisations are looking for a consistent way to tell that story so that the business people - and the IT people - can understand what we're talking about!

There's a concept that I've taken to calling 'Mancini's Law' that basically is this: organisations are collections of information systems, and they only work as effectively as the information flows - both within a system and across systems. And those 'connecting points' are being frayed right now because of the sheer volume of information. Whether it is the Internet of Things or whatever, the entire 'volume, velocity and variety' question is changing fundamentally right now - and that is forcing organisations to change.

DT: Haven't we heard much of this argument before from the DM/ECM industry?
JM: Our contention is that we're in a different environment from the first time we went through all this in the early 2000s, when people basically bolted on an e-business to the side of their existing business and said 'Job done'. Now they really have to look at the fundamental nature of their business, and how it is being changed by technology. How is it being influenced by everything being connected to everything else? And what - if anything - should they do about it? They can't just ad-hoc it any more or else they will just wind up being in even deeper chaos.

There are still a lot of people out there who like to think that they can manage information assets by managing the device rather than managing the information itself - that is just a losing proposition! You aren't going to stop people from bringing their own devices into the enterprise, or from working at alternate locations, or from working on a mixture of privately owned and corporately owned devices and systems. In that kind of totally heterogeneous environment, the only thing you can do is treat information as an asset, and manage the asset itself. This is something that very few organisations are any good at, right now.

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